Quotes about uncategorised

In a scheme of policy which is devised for a nation, we should not limit our views to its operation during a single year, or even for a short term of years. We should look at its operation for a considerable time, and in war as well as in peace.

— Henry Clay

If I may I would like to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and give you a definition for each word. Ime, an individual, a committee of one. Pledgededicate all of my worldly goods to give without self-pity. Allegiancemy love and my devotion. To the Flagour standard, Old Glory, a symbol of freedom. Wherever she waves, there is respect because your loyalty has given her a dignity that shouts freedom is everybodys job. Of the Unitedthat means that we have all come together. Statesindividual communities that have united into 48 great states, 48 individual communities with pride and dignity and purpose, all divided with imaginary boundaries, yet united to a common purpose, and thats love for country. Of America. And to the Republica state in which sovereign power is invested in representatives chosen by the people to govern. And government is the people and its from the people to the leaders, not from the leaders to the people. For which it stands. One nationmeaning, so blessed by God. Indivisibleincapable of being divided. With libertywhich is freedom and the right of power to live ones own life without threats or fear or some sort of retaliation. And justiceThe principle or quality of dealing fairly with others. For allwhich means its as much your country as it is mine.

— Red Skelton

We should never despair, our Situation before has been unpromising and has changed for the better, so I trust, it will again. If new difficulties arise, we must only put forth New Exertions and proportion our Efforts to the exigency of the times.

— George Washington

Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heartone of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man.

— Edgar Allan Poe

There is a destiny that makes us brothers:None goes his way alone:All that we send into the lives of othersComes back onto our own.

— Edwin Markham

Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, neverin nothing, great or small, large or pettynever give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.

— Winston Churchill

We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in Gods good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

— Winston Churchill

By his father he is English, by his mother he is Americanto my mind the blend which makes the perfect man.

— Mark Twain

We are all imperfect. We can not expect perfect government.

— William Howard Taft

I never expect to see a perfect work from imperfect man.

— Alexander Hamilton

Speak not too well of one who scarce will knowHimself transfigured in its roseate glow;Say kindly of him what is, chiefly, true,Remembering always he belongs to you;Deal with him as a truant, if you will,But claim him, keep him, call him brother still!

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

No one can be perfectly free till all are free; no one can be perfectly moral till all are moral; no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.

— Herbert Spencer

No democracy has ever long survived the failure of its adherents to be ready to die for it. My own conviction is this, the people must either go on or go under.

— David Lloyd George

No People can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand, which conducts the Affairs of men more than the People of the United States. Every step, by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation, seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency.

— George Washington

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were: any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.

— John Donne

Where there is no vision, the people perish.

— Bible

I can not wish you success in your effort to reject the treaty because while it may win the fight it may destroy our cause. My plan cannot fail if the people are with us and we ought not to succeed unless we do have the people with us.

— William Jennings Bryan

I am a child of the House of Commons. I was brought up in my fathers house to believe in democracy. Trust the peoplethat was his message.

— Winston Churchill

Your people, sir, is nothing but a great beast!

— Alexander Hamilton

Would yee both eat your cake, and have your cake?

— John Heywood

The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.

— Thomas Jefferson

A sense of this necessity, and a submission to it, is to me a new and consolatory proof that wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.

— Thomas Jefferson

The President to-night has a dream:He was in a party of plain people, and, as it became known who he was, they began to comment on his appearance. One of them said:He is a very common-looking man. The President replied:The Lord prefers common-looking people. That is the reason he makes so many of them.

— Abraham Lincoln

It is not enough just to be for peace. The point is, what can we do about it?

— Richard M. Nixon

There are people in our society who should be separated and discarded. I think its one of the tendencies of the liberal community to feel that every person in a nation of over 200 million people can be made into a productive citizen. Im realist enough to believe this cant be. Were always going to have our prisons, were always going to have our places of preventive detention for psychopaths, and were always going to have a certain number of people in our community who have no desire to achieve or who have no desire to even fit in an amicable way with the rest of society. And these people should be separated from the community, not in a callous way but they should be separated as far as any idea that their opinions shall have any effect on the course we follow.

— Spiro T. Agnew

So let us here resolve that Dag Hammarskjold did not live, or die, in vain. Let us call a truce to terror. Let us invoke the blessings of peace. And, as we build an international capacity to keep peace, let us join in dismantling the national capacity to wage war.

— John F. Kennedy

I like to believe that people, in the long run, are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

Peace with all nations, and the right which that gives us with respect to all nations, are our object.

— Thomas Jefferson

That peace, safety, and concord may be the portion of our native land, and be long enjoyed by our fellow-citizens, is the most ardent wish of my heart, and if I can be instrumental in procuring or preserving them, I shall think I have not lived in vain.

— Thomas Jefferson

Yes, God and the politicians willing, the United States can declare peace upon the world, and win it.

— Ely Culbertson

At present the peace of the world has been preserved, not by statesmen, but by capitalists.

— Benjamin Disraeli

If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public libraries. These libraries should be open to allexcept the censor. We must know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms. Let us welcome controversial books and controversial authors. For the Bill of Rights is the guardian of our security as well as our liberty.

— John F. Kennedy

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

— Bible

They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.

— Bible

When things are investigated, then true knowledge is achieved; when true knowledge is achieved, then the will becomes sincere; when the will is sincere, then the heart is set right ; when the heart is set right, then the personal life is cultivated; when the personal life is cultivated, then the family life is regulated; when the family life is regulated, then the national life is orderly; and when the national life is orderly, then there is peace in this world.

— Confucius

Senator [Stephen] Douglas is of world-wide renown. All the anxious politicians of his party, or who have been of his party for years past, have been looking upon him as certainly, at no distant day, to be the President of the United States. They have seen in his round, jolly, fruitful face, postoffices, landoffices, marshalships, and cabinet appointments, chargeships and foreign missions, bursting and sprouting out in wonderful exuberance ready to be laid hold of by their greedy hands.

— Abraham Lincoln

With earnest prayers to all my friends to cherish mutual good will, to promote harmony and conciliation, and above all things to let the love of our country soar above all minor passions, I tender you the assurance of my affectionate esteem and respect.

— Thomas Jefferson

True patriotism sometimes requires of men to act exactly contrary, at one period, to that which it does at another, and the motive which impels themthe desire to do rightis precisely the same.

— Robert E. Lee

Intellectually I know America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every other country.

— Sinclair Lewis

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstacy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

— Ernest Hemingway

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,Who never to himself hath said,This is my own, my native land!Whose heart hath neer within him burnd,As home his footsteps he hath turnd,From wandering on a foreign strand!

— Sir Walter Scott

Citizens by birth or choice, of a common country, that country has a right to concentrate your affections. The name of AMERICAN, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of Patriotism, more than any appellation derived from local discriminations.

— George Washington

We would rather starve than sell our national honor.

— Indira Gandhi

The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

— Abraham Lincoln

America now is stumbling through the darkness of hatred and divisiveness. Our values, our principles, and our determination to succeed as a free and democratic people will give us a torch to light the way. And we will survive and become the strongernot only because of a patriotism that stands for love of country, but a patriotism that stands for love of people.

— Gerald R. Ford

The question Whether one generation of men has a right to bind another, seems never to have been started either on this or our side of the water. I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self evident, that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living: that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.

— Thomas Jefferson

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience.

— George Santayana

How can we live without our lives? How will we know its us without our past?

— John Steinbeck

There must be what Mr. Gladstone many years ago called a blessed act of oblivion. We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past. We must look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward across the years that are to come the hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past.

— Winston Churchill

Our duty is to preserve what the past has had to say for itself, and to say for ourselves what shall be true for the future.

— John Ruskin

Whereof what's past is prologue; what to come, In yours and my discharge.

— William Shakespeare

More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.

— Robert Penn Warren

One thing alone not even God can do,To make undone whatever hath been done.

— Aristotle

If you delay till to-morrow what ought to be done to-day, you overcharge the morrow with a burden which belongs not to it. You load the wheels of time, and prevent it from carrying you along smoothly. He who every morning plans the transactions of the day, and follows out the plan, carries on a thread which will guide him through the labyrinth of the most busy life. The orderly arrangement of his time is like a ray of light which darts itself through all his affairs. But where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incidents, all things lie huddled together in one chaos, which admits neither of distribution nor review.

— Hugh Blair

Oh, order! Material order, intellectual order, moral order! What a comfort and strength, and what an economy! To know where we are going and what we want; that is order. To keep ones word, to do the right thing, and at the right time: more order. To have everything under ones hand, to put ones whole army through its manoeuvres, to work with all ones resources: still order. To discipline ones habits and efforts and wishes, to organize ones life and distribute ones time, to measure ones duties and assert ones rights, to put ones capital and resources, ones talents and opportunities to profit: again and always order. Order is light, peace, inner freedom, self-determination: it is power. To conceive order, to return to order, to realize order in oneself, around oneself, by means of oneself, this is aesthetic and moral beauty, it is well-being, it is what ought to be.

— Henri Frederic Amiel

When the mariner has been tossed for many days in thick weather, and on an unknown sea, he naturally avails himself of the first pause in the storm, the earliest glance of the sun, to take his latitude, and ascertain how far the elements have driven him from his true course. Let us imitate this prudence, and, before we float farther on the waves of this debate, refer to the point from which we departed, that we may at least be able to conjecture where we now are.

— Daniel Webster

Also the two-edged tongue of mighty Zeno, who, Say what one would, could argue it untrue.

— Plutarch

The art of reasoning becomes of first importance. In this line antiquity has left us the finest models for imitation; I should consider the speeches of Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus, as pre-eminent specimens of logic, taste, and that sententious brevity which, using not a word to spare, leaves not a moment for inattention to the hearer. Amplification is the vice of modern oratory.

— Thomas Jefferson

It is amazing how soon one becomes accustomed to the sound of ones voice, when forced to repeat a speech five or six times a day. As election day approaches, the size of the crowds grows; they are more responsive and more interested; and one derives a certain exhilaration from that which, only a few weeks before, was intensely painful. This is one possible explanation of unlimited debate in the Senate.

— J. William Fulbright

Every living sentence which shows a mind at work for itself is to be welcomed. It is not the first use but the tiresome repetition of inadequate catch words which I am observingphrases which originally were contributions, but which, by their very felicity, delay further analysis for fifty years. That comes from the same source as dislike of noveltyintellectual indolence or weaknessa slackening in the eternal pursuit of the more exact.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Then there was a maiden speech, so inaudible, that it was doubted whether, after all, the young orator really did lose his virginity.

— Benjamin Disraeli

One woman who managed to corner him, the story runs, said in a treacly gushing voice:Doesnt it thrill you, Mr. Churchill, to know that every time you make a speech the hall is packed to overflowing?It is quite flattering, Mr. Churchill replied, but whenever I feel this way I always remember that if instead of making a political speech I was being hanged, the crowd would be twice as big.

— Winston Churchill

I was very glad that Mr. Attlee described my speeches in the war as expressing the will not only of Parliament but of the whole nation. Their will was resolute and remorseless and, as it proved, unconquerable. It fell to me to express it, and if I found the right words you must remember that I have always earned my living by my pen and by my tongue. It was a nation and race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.

— Winston Churchill

The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holders lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately.

— Bertrand Russell

There are as many opinions as there are experts.

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

After the war, and until the day of his death, his position on almost every public question was either mischievous or ridiculous, and usually both.

— Theodore Roosevelt

This imputation of inconsistency is one to which every sound politician and every honest thinker must sooner or later subject himself. The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinion.

— James Russell Lowell

There is the grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne. He says NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes. For all men who say yes, lie; and all men who say no,why, they are in the happy condition of judicious, unincumbered travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but a carpet-bag,that is to say, the Ego. Whereas those yes-gentry, they travel with heaps of baggage, and, damn them! they will never get through the Custom House.

— Herman Melville

We cannot ask a man what he will do, and if we should, and he should answer us, we should despise him for it. Therefore we must take a man whose opinions are known.

— Abraham Lincoln

I have got you together to hear what I have written down. I do not wish your advice about the main matterfor that I have determined for myself.

— Abraham Lincoln

If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

— Thomas Jefferson

There is probably an element of malice in the readiness to overestimate people; we are laying up for ourselves the pleasure of later cutting them down to size.

— Eric Hoffer

Be NOBLE! and the nobleness that liesIn other men, sleeping, but never dead,Will rise in majesty to meet thine own.

— James Russell Lowell

We are not bent on conquest or on threatening others. But we do have a nuclear umbrella that can protect others, above all the states to which we are allied or in which we have a great national interest.

— Richard M. Nixon

So I became a newspaperman. I hated to do it but I couldnt find honest employment.

— Mark Twain

As one lamp lights another, nor grows less,So nobleness enkindleth nobleness.

— James Russell Lowell

What a curious picture it is to find man, homo sapiens, of divine origin, we are told, seriously considering going underground to escape the consequences of his own folly. With a little wisdom and foresight, surely it is not yet necessary to forsake life in the fresh air and in the warmth of the sunlight. What a paradox if our own cleverness in science should force us to live underground with the moles.

— J. William Fulbright

I generalized rashly: That is what kills political writing, this absurd pretence that you are delivering a great utterance. You never do. You are just a puzzled man making notes about what you think. You are not building the Pantheon, then why act like a graven image? You are drawing sketches in the sand which the sea will wash away.

— Walter Lippmann

But let me beseech you, Sir, not to let this letter get into a newspaper. Tranquillity, at my age, is the supreme good of life. I think it a duty, and it is my earnest wish, to take no further part in public affairs. The abuse of confidence by publishing my letters has cost me more than all other pains.

— Thomas Jefferson

For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct. It is the only serious book most people read. It is the only book they read every day.

— Walter Lippmann

The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.

— Thomas Jefferson

I well believe it, to unwilling ears;None love the messenger who brings bad news.

— Sophocles

For want of a Nail the Shoe was lost; for want of a Shoe the Horse was lost; and for want of a Horse the Rider was lost; being overtaken and slain by the Enemy, all for want of Care about a Horse-shoe Nail.

— Benjamin Franklin

The one great poem of New England is her Sunday.

— Henry Ward Beecher

There is good news tonight.

— Gabriel Heatter

Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation seem to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration. This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivablethough much less certainthat extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat or exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air.

— Albert Einstein

Not gold but only men can makeA people great and strong;Men who for truth and honors sakeStand fast and suffer long. Brave men who work while others sleep,Who dare while others flyThey build a nations pillars deepAnd lift them to the sky.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three the only trustworthy one is the last.

— John Ruskin

Happy are all free peoples, too strong to be dispossessed. But blessed are those among nations who dare to be strong for the rest!

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The plea of good intentions is not one that can be allowed to have much weight in passing historical judgment upon a man whose wrong-headedness and distorted way of looking at things produced, or helped to produce, such incalculable evil; there is a wide political applicability in the remark attributed to a famous Texan, to the effect that he might, in the end, pardon a man who shot him on purpose, but that he would surely never forgive one who did so accidentally.

— Theodore Roosevelt

We must not inquire too curiously into motives. they are apt to become feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep the germinating grain away from the light.

— George Eliot

If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst forth at once in the sky, that would be like the splendour of the Mighty One. I am mighty, world-destroying Time

— Bhagavad Gita

All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.

— Abraham Lincoln

Dreadful will be the day when the world becomes contented, when one great universal satisfaction spreads itself over the world. Sad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life that he is living, with the thoughts that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger which he knows that he was meant and made to do because he is a child of God.

— Phillips Brooks

So fleet the works of men, back to their earth again;Ancient and holy things fade like a dream.

— Charles Kingsley

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: And this, too, shall pass away. How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride!how consoling in the depth of affliction!

— Abraham Lincoln

At thirty, man suspects himself a fool;Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan;At fifty, chides his infamous delay,Pushes his prudent purpose to resolve;In all the magnanimity of thoughtResolves, and re-resolves; then dies the same. And why? Because he thinks himself immortal. All men think all men mortal but themselves.

— Edward Young

Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. That is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.

— Albert Schweitzer

Dont strew me with roses after Im dead. When Death claims the light of my brow,No flowers of life will cheer me: insteadYou may give me my roses now!

— Thomas F. Healey

Faded the flower and all its budded charms,Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes,Faded the shape of beauty from my arms,Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise!Vanishd unseasonably

— John Keats